Iran deal progress murky after US military’s strikes

Iran condemns strikes as show of 'bad faith', warns of consequences

By AP

DUBAI, May 26: President Donald Trump insists a peace deal is close on the 88th day of the Iran war, but Iran on Tuesday denounced US airstrikes a day earlier as a sign of “bad faith and unreliability” as negotiations continue toward a possible deal to end the war.

The US military has characterised Monday’s strikes in southern Iran as defensive, saying targets included missile launch sites and boats placing mines, and said the US acted with “restraint” in light of the weeks-long ceasefire.

The strikes were done “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” but the military was “using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire,” Capt Tim Hawkins, the spokesman for the US military’s Central Command, said in a statement.

Iran’s foreign ministry called the strikes a cease-fire violation and warned that Washington would bear responsibility for “all consequences”, without details.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will leave no act of aggression unanswered,” it added in a statement.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Tuesday said it had shot down and deterred drones and a fighter jet that entered its airspace, according to Iran’s official Mizan news agency, which did not specify when the incident occurred.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the developments would mean for negotiations. The strikes came after Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghali-baf went to Qatar as part of the talks, which Trump said Monday were “proceeding nicely”.

The strikes were the lat-est flare-up in the fragile ceasefire that began April 7 and has largely held.

Negotiations centre in part on the Strait of Hor-muz, the crucial waterway off southern Iran through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil and natural gas passed before the war began with US-Israeli strikes in February. Tehran retaliated by effectively closing the strait, stranding hundreds of ships and shocking the global economy.

The strait has become a powerful lever for Tehran in talks, joining the long-run-ning issue of Iran’s nuclear programme and highly en-riched uranium. Iran in turn wants the US to lift its mili-tary blockade of Iranian ports that began on April 17.

The strait also is cause for growing concern as supplies of fertilizer are also badly af-fected for vulnerable global farmers.

“What we are witnessing today is not only a geopo-litical crisis, it is a systemic shock to the global agrifood system,” the director-general of the UN’s Food and Ag-riculture Organization, Qu Dongyu, said Tuesday.

Trump has introduced a new angle in negotiations for a deal on the war, saying any agreement to end the war should include a requirement for several additional coun-tries, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered diplomatic, economic and security agree-ments aimed at normalising relations with Israel.

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates became the first countries to join in 2020; Sudan, Morocco and Ka-zakhstan have followed. Egypt and Jordan already formally recognize Israel and have long-standing peace treaties. Turkey first recog-nised Israel in 1949.

Israel’s conduct against Palestinians, including in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has alien-ated Gulf Arab states and the wider Muslim world, but Trump has been keen to build on the Abraham Accords, forged during his first term. He even has suggested that Iran eventually could sign on.